Yesterday, 30 December 2012, I returned to De Young Museum in San Francisco for The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism, on the very last day of the exhibit, of which The De Young Museum website informed us was "A selection of major works from the William S. Paley Collection at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.. A pioneering figure in the modern entertainment,
communication and news industries, Mr. Paley (1901–1990) was a founder
of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and a dedicated
philanthropist and patron of the arts. The Paley Collection, which
includes paintings, sculpture and drawings, ranges in date from the late
19th century through the early 1970s. Particularly strong in French
Post-Impressionism and Modernism, the collection includes multiple works
by Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as
significant works by Edgar Degas, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin,
Andre Derain, Georges Rouault and artists of the Nabis School such as
Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard."

It was an astonishingly rich collection and one highlight succeeded another. Though I've seen most of them in New York's MOMA, it was wonderful to see them again, in our home museum. Amongst those wonderful works, I particularly love these below:

The Seed of the Areoi, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Strawberries, c 1905, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Milk Can and Apples (1879-80), Paul Cezanne

Reclining Nude, 1897, Pierre Bonnard

Two Dancers, 1905, Edgar Degas

Mme Lili Grenier, 1888, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Woman with a Veil, c 1907, Henri Matisse

Seated Woman with a Vase of Amaryllis, 1941, Henri Matisse

Odalisque with a Tambourine, Henri Matisse

Boy Leading a Horse, 1905-06, Pablo Picasso

Still Life with Guitar, 1920, Pablo Picasso

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1925, Georges Rouault

Oasis (Mirage), 1944, Georges Rouault

I also stopped by to see another special exhibit: Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance, which featured photos, video clips and costumes of the great dancer, overwhelming in its opulence and extravagance with a tint of vulgarity, redeemed by his unapologetic conviction.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Recently, I read an article online on a Chinese newspaper, Global Times, speculating that the great Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh's unique vision might be due to his possible colorblindness. The theory was hypothesized by a Japanese medical scientist, Kazunori Asada. It published several photos of Van Gogh's original painting and filtered version of them, simulating what colorblind people would see, and several scenery photos as well, both "normal" and "colorblind" versions.

Kazunori Asada, a Japanese medical scientist, has hypothesized that Vincent van Gogh was colorblind — a theory that would explain the artist’s use of clashing, often discordant colors.
Asada was incited to explore the theory after visiting a “Color Vision Experience Room” in Hokkaido, which provides visitors with the opportunity to experience vision as a colorblind person does.

To test his theory, Asada used a piece of software that filters light to
simulate various degrees of colorblindness. Asada settled on a midrange
spectrum deficiency to apply to several of van Gogh’s paintings, a
process which subtly but significantly changed the overall color effect
of each work: the reds became softer, the blues less notable, and the
yellows muted to the point of drab.

Kyle Chayka at BLOUIN Artinfo challenges the theory,
reminding Asada that one of the commonalities among Post-Impressionist
artists, including Paul Gauguin and André Derain, was an “unorthodox” pairing of colors.

Below are those scenery photos from Global Times as mentioned in the beginning of this blog post. Again, the right column images are of the simulated colorblind vision:

These are very interesting images. For those scenery pictures, I actually prefer the "colorblind version" for their otherworldly poetic atmosphere.

However, I cannot deny that those pictures are only shadows of the real thing and miss a huge dimension. This realization in turn reminded me of an intense experience I had recently regarding olfactory sense.

One day, despite struggling with a cold, I made a chicken stew, with a large array of spices. Through my congested nose, I was satisfied with the lovely smell emitted from the stove top. A nice stew of intense flavor and smell. Satisfied.

Yet, not until midnight that I realized what I had smelled earlier was only a shadow of the reality.

In the middle of night, my nose suddenly got cleared up and an ever more intense smell of delicious cooking crashed into my bedroom and every cell of my body was stirred by the fortissimo olfactory symphony. The flavors danced and clashed in the air and I was both amazed and irritated, thinking that one of my neighbors must be cooking in the ungodly hour. Slowly, with my head got clearer, I realized that it was the remaining smell of my own chicken stew, prepared several hours earlier, from my very own kitchen.

It was a very strange experience. Yes, while cooking, I knew my stew smelled great. Only later that I realized I was only smelling the shadow of it. What glory the reality was, comparing to some filtered ones! By extension, our little understanding of the universe we live in is only the shadow of shadow of shadow, perhaps. And that's very optimistic.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Though I have always been drawn to Northern and Central European artists, such as those from Germany and Netherlands, before my recent trip to Vienna, Austrian artists, beside Oska Kokoschka, hadn't made much impression on me, though I was not aware of other leading figures, such as Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918).

Of these two, I was more familiar with Klimt, largely due to the broadly-reported lawsuit over his painting, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which eventually was transferred from Belvedere, Austria to the heir to its original Jewish owner, then was sold to Neue Galerie, New York, and there I saw the painting in 2010, along with Klimt's Bildnes Baronin Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt (Portrait of Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt). During the same trip, in New York MOMA, I also saw Klimt's Hope, II. Egon Schiele was fuzzier to me.

Hope, II, 1907-08, Gustav Klimt, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York City

In October, I re-visited Vienna, Austria, where the 150th anniversary of Gustav Klimt was being celebrated by practically every important art museum, therefore my survey of his oeuvre became more comprehensive and I had much better understanding of Klimt.

In the meanwhile, the new museums I visited during that second trip to Vienna, mostly concentrating on Austrian art, brought me to the presence of another great Austrian artist, Egon Schiele and he instantaneously became one of my favorite artists.

Both Klimt and Schiele represented perfectly their time and place, with the older Klimt, the epitome of eroticism and decadence, the excess of fin de siècle, thoroughly bourgeois, and the younger Schiele, the comprehensive fear of the end of the century and the clear and present doom to come, despite his occasional Tiffany lamp styled, innocent enough landscapes and townscapes.

Since Klimt was the of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) in 1897, it is fitting to start my discussion from a trip to Secession Building (Wiener Secessionsgebäude).

Secession (Wiener Secessionsgebäude), Wien

The center piece of Klimt celebration in this rather modest museum was the Beethoven Frieze, loaned from Upper Belvedere, after Richard Wagner's interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with an overall length of 34.14 m (long walls 13.92 m each, front wall 6.30 m), and height of 2.15
- 2.00 m. There was a fascinating video of the restoration process of this rather delicate, and "temporary" work. There was a replica of a section of it for viewers to exam very closely. For the real thing, one could see it in reasonably close range, on raised platform, mounted on top of a specially built room to its specific dimensions, covering all four sides of the wall. The dominant theme was love or lust and the overwhelming color was gold. This series was heavy with symbols yet I felt it was a bit underwhelmed, despite its visual dazzle.

Beethoven Frieze restoration video, Secession, Wien

Beethoven Frieze restoration video, Secession, Wien

Beethoven Frieze copy, Secession, Wien

For more permanent murals by Klimt, one should go to Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum. I did spent a night at Burgtheater for a play by Herinch von Kleist - Der Prinz von Homburg, but we missed the entrance to the grand staircase adored with Klimt's murals before the show and it was closed afterward. No intermission to exploit. We were able, however, to see some of his drawings on the wall, just outside the auditorium. Without the glittery colors he loved to employ, one could appreciate more of his draftsmanship but they didn't have the hallmarks of a Klimt and definitely was not as satisfying.

Burgtheater, Wien

Klimt Drawing, Burgtheater, Wien

The great art museum Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna celebrated Klimt with another raised platform, granting viewers a close look to Klimt murals dressed in their most splendid colors. The theme was aptly called "Face to Face with Gustav Klimt". His figures, confined in the niches, were quite like late medieval to early Renaissance paintings, stylized, otherworldly and absolutely enchanting. They bore less obvious hallmark of Klimt we generally attributed to him - free-flowing sumptuousness. Here, they were tightly controlled. Very classical.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

Face to Face with Gustav Klimt, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

Face to Face with Gustav Klimt, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

Klimt's more signature paintings could be seen in two museums specializing in Austrian arts: Oberes Belvedere (Upper Belvedere) and Leopold Museum. These two museums, particularly Leopold, also boasted a stunning collection of Egon Schiele.

Oberes Belvedere and Fountain, Wien

Oberes Belvedere and Fountain, Wien

Klimt's paintings in Oberes Belvedere bore all the familiar traits of his; even his landscape had an unfettered sensuality, which was the hallmark of its epoch of self-expression and self-indulgence, of Freud.

His figure, particularly those female nudes, such as Eve (Eva) and Judith below, seemed live in the time and space utterly outside the domain implied by their respective titles. They were confident, seductive and overtly sensual. The juxtaposition of endless arrays of colors and patterns were dazzling. However, the overwhelming compote induced a sensation verging at nauseating.

After Klimt, the symbol of sumptuousness and sensuality of Fin de siècle and Viennese Secession, Egon Schiele's paintings of expressionism school, collected by the same Oberes Belvedere, Wien, were nitty-gritty reality, viewed through a personal lens, with a man whose creative height coincided with the brutal World War I. Even his quite becalming landscapes and townscapes had an unsettled feeling, and later in years, such as his 1917 Vier Bäume, a color scheme reminding viewers of bloodshed, despite and because of its undeniably beauty and certain nauseatingly sweetness.

Fensterwand (Hauswand), Egon Schiele, 1914, Oberes Belvedere, Wien

Vier Bäume, Egon Schiele, 1917, Oberes Belvedere, Wien

Move on to his figure paintings, one was flooded by the survey of resigned hopelessness, yearning desire for life and love in adversary, and utter despair. Here were the manifests of tragedy of human race.

Astonishingly, Leopold Museum provided even more comprehensive survey of Egon Schiele, along with a few canvases of Gustav Klimt.

Leopold Museu, Wien

Leopold Museu, Wien

The Klimt paintings in Leopold were early works, in the realism tradition, though not without the keen psychological observation in its portraits.

Gustav Klimt, Leopold Museum, Wien

Gustav Klimt, Leopold Museum, Wien

Leopold Museum did have one of his later works, a masterpiece, Tod und Leben (Death and Life), which seemed combined the outlandish surface beauty of his own, and the depressing pessimism from his younger peer, Egon Schiele.

Tod und Leben, 1910, Gustav Klimt, Leopold Museum, Wien

However, no one could outdo Egon Schiele in the province of unmitigable sadness and despair, demonstrated by his seemingly innocent landscapes and townscapes, seductive femme fatales, and the most wrenching group portraits. He became my new hero, who had an unflinching look at misery and death.

Speaking of death, a sad note was that both Klimt and Schiele died in 1918, of the great influenza after World War I. Death had never been far away from frivolity.